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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Stanton:

Oh, exit polling. Well, that was the next step up the ladder of technique. I had nothing to do with that. I certainly supported it when they were under attack, because I thought it was a pretty clever idea, if you picked your precincts properly. You couldn't afford to do it in every precinct, but this now gets back to the kind of sampling thing we were doing on getting the votes from those precincts, which in some cases, I'm sure, we shouldn't have had access to. But, if you could ask people leaving the polling place how they voted (and most people are pretty easy to talk to about that), and you did enough sampling, you could come up with a very solid answer. Then, that crossed into the whole question of reporting the overall election before the West Coast closed the polls. I had fights about that in the early days, spent a lot of the stockholders money on research, and could never find any evidence that it would have made any difference in California (I didn't go to Hawaii). People say, “Well, wait until California closes.” Well, what are you going to do? Disenfranchise Hawaii and Alaska? Then people say they don't count. Well, that's a hell of a thing to say, in a democracy. So, there's only one answer to it, in my opinion. There's only one answer, to settle once and for all this question about the influence of New Jersey on California, and that's to have them both close at the same time. Then people say, “Well, that means that California has to close at 9:00, and that means New York can't close until 12:00, that's an inconvenience on the part of the people in New York.” There's an answer to that, if they'll play the game. Do twenty-four hour polling.

Q:

Yes, well, that's something you've advocated for a long time.

Stanton:

Well, sure. That was another one of my Johnny-One-Notes. Because if you start at midnight and go until midnight (don't take midnight, but take a reasonable hour that





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